Imagine you're holding something in your hand. It's about the size of a belt buckle. It's metal. And it feels cold against your skin, a slight heavyness that feels comfiterable resting in your hand. If you run your thumb over it, you feel smooth ridges. Or sharp little edges where the metal has been cut away. It's brownish, silver, maybe a little green in the crevices where the corrosion has set in. You take a look. You see lines, you see a beast, you see symbols. You are holding the Urnes broch. And this isn't just a piece of Viking jewelry. It is a survivor. It is a time traveler. An active participant. 

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We are so used to thinking of these artifacts, these museum pieces as passive things. Just objects in a case. But the Urnes clasp have been incredibly busy for the last 1,000 years. It has been doing things. What do I mean? Lets look at this clasp through a very specific lens, taking a cultural historical perspective on materiality. 

First we need to understand the world this clasp was born into. We're talking about the late Viking Age, roughly 1050 to 1100. And this is a fascinating period. It's often overlooked because everyone loved the early Viking Age, the raids on Lindisfarne, the longships, the Great Heathen Army. But this, this is the twilight. the deaths of kings like Harold Hardrada at Stamford Bridge in 1066. Christianity is really taking root, displacing the old gods, building churches. It's a time of massive transition. The Urnes style is the last of the great Scandinavian art styles. 

We need to understand the Urnes style. The Urnes clasp. It's openwork metal. Which just means it's not a solid disk. It's see-through like lace. And the central motif is a classic: the great beast fighting serpents. A timeless theme. We see this everywhere, the lion batteling the snake, good versus evil, order versus chaos. It goes back to the Migration Period, and you can even find versions of it in Scythian art from the steppes. But the execution is totally unique. Boni Wiik, the woodcarver, describes the lines as stretched, resilient, slightly curved. Resilient is the key word there. Like a rubber band. If you just lay a rubber band on the table, it's a circle. It's boring. It's static. But if you stretch it between two fingers until it's almost ready to snap, that line has energy. That is what the Urnes lines look like. They look like they are under constant tension. it's not a static drawing. It's a captured moment of force. In the earlier styles, like the Mammen style, the beasts were heavy. They were muscular, planted on the ground. Here, the beast is elegant. It's almost weightless. And Wiik points out something critical about the movement specifically of the serpents. In earlier Viking art, you see a lot of spirals, spirals are concentric, They coil in on themselves, but in the Urnes style, the serpents move in figure eights and circular S-shapes. it's a different kind of loop, a continuous flowing loop, a figure eight, the infinity symbol. It creates a sense of perpetual motion. In this ornametistyle, your eyes never rests, they follow the snake, it loops over the beast, under the belly, around the neck, and back again, keeping the viewer active. It forces your eye to dance around the object. Wick's analysis reviews what He calls the reversed eye. In a naturalistic drawing of an animal, a corner of the eye usually points back towards the ear, But on the Urnes clasp, the almond-shaped eye points forward, toward the snout. Biological wrong, but stylistically brilliant. It creates a streamlined forward momentum. It follows the shape of the cranium, the skull. Wick notes that even though it's unnatural, it makes the beast look aerodynamic. It directs the viewer's gaze forward, along the snout, toward the action, toward the bite. It creates speed. It's an aesthetic choice designed for velocity, not for realism. 

The connection to Urnes Stavechurch is vital, because it connects the miniature to the monumental. The Urnes Stave Church in Luster, Norway and its engraved portal, the carving on what was the formar entrance portal. The carvings are massive, carved pine, And the clasp is tiny made with bronze. How do you translate a style from a giant door to a tiny pin you wear on your cloak? That is the challenge of the craftsman, and Week makes a brilliant comparison regarding scale and contrast. On the Urnes Church portal, there are these heavy, powerful beast bodies, and then these hair-thin serpent lines biting them. You can really see the difference in weight. On the broche - the snakes are thicker relative to the beast. It's a more compressed design, but it still feels the same. It has the same energy. It's a masterpiece of compression, taking a monumental architectural style and shrinking it down without losing its soul to something you can pin.

the conversationoften stops with saying, look, it's a lion fighting a snake. It symbolizes struggle. Date it to 1070. Put it in a case. Write the label. We treat it as an object, a static container of meaning. We read it like a book and then we put it on the shelf. But, Olsen, Ingold, Rubio - they are practically shouting to stop doing this practice. They want us to look at the materiality. They want us to look at the rust, the dirt, the way it interacts with the world. This is the theoretical shift, and it starts with a concept that Bjornar Olsen calls the Betrayal of Things. Olsen is an archaeologist who is very frustrated with his own field and with the social sciences in general. He argues that for a long time, we've completely ignored the thingness of things. We've been too obsessed with the people behind the things, with the social structures.. When we look at the Urnes clasp, we immediately ask, what does this say about the Viking social hierarchy or what does this tell us about trade routes? We treat the material world as just a passive backdrop for the human drama. Or worse, we treat objects as symbols, just stand-ins for ideas. Like the clasp is just a word made of metal. Olsen says this is a betrayal because the world isn't made of ideas, it's made of stuff. Hard, physical, resistant, messy stuff. And that stuff has its own life. It has its own agenda. This connects perfectly to Tim Ingold's work. He wrote an essay, Materials Against Materiality.  Ingold argues the materials interac with the environment - Its not a static object. It is a gathering of materials in constant flux. That is a profound shift in thinking. We're so used to thinking of objects as having hard boundaries.  applying this to the Urnes clasp -The Urnes clasp isn't a static Viking object. It is metal in flux. It is actively reacting to the oxygen in the room right now. It reacts to the soil it was buried in for hundreds of years. It reacts to the humidity in the museum case. It would react to the oils on your skin if you touched it. It's chemically active. It's alive in a way. In a material sense. It is constantly becoming something else, molecule by molecule. And this leads me to Fernando Domínguez Bogo and his geological approach. He makes a brilliant distinction between the thing and the object. Rubio argues that the thing is the physical reality. It's the rotting wood, the rusting metal, the cracking paint. It's the material process that wants to decay and return to the earth. It's entropy in action. And the object? The object is the social identity we slap onto that thing. The object is the stable idea we have of it. 

The Urnes Briche as a museum object is making the world interact with it - Climate control, bulletproof glass, security guards, teams of restorers. All of these external forces holding it together. If you turned off the air conditioning, let it be alone, the thing, the metal, would rust over time. It would become weaker, crack, break, and eventually, the object would vanish. The museum is basically a life support machine, always making sure time does not past within these objects. Making sure time can not grasp it, and let it decay naturally. It's a machine designed to fight the thing in order to save the object. And the Urnes clasp is in a constant struggle. The metal wants to corrode. It wants to turn into dust. That is its nature as a thing. And the museum is fighting against chemistry to stabilize it, to freeze it as the Urnes clasp, the historical object. The museum doesn't just work its way with air conditioning and silica gel packets. It is also active with data, with paperwork. Jan W. Olrud writes about documenting museum objects and about how the museum machine enacts the object.

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​He argues that as soon as the object enters the museum, it stops being the object. It undergoes a fundamental transformation. It gets a new name and a number. It becomes data and a catalog entry. Olrud calls this the contextual copy. The museum creates a text version of the object. Find context, Material, Technique, cast, Date, place of origin, condition. And the act of filling in those fields is an act of creation. It's not just description. It's prescriptive. facts associated with the object forever. It freezes the object in time. Olrud points this out. The catalog entry fixes the date of creation, accession, the date it entered the museum. But it completely ignores the fact that the metal is still aging. In the database, the Urnes clasp is immortal. It is static. But in the drawer, in the climate-controlled room, the metal is still slowly, slowly changing. That's the discrepancy again. The database object is timeless. The physical thing is vulnerable and mortal. And Olrud notes something really interesting about the visual representation in these catalogs. Usually it's a photo, a scam or a drawing, sometimes no picture at all. If one would take a photo of the the Urnes clasp, it might emphasize the Urnes style, not the microscopic pits of corrosion. It might forces us to see the art and ignore the matter. It strips away the smell of the metal, the temperature, the weight, all the things Tim Ingold says are crucial to actually understanding it as a material thing. It's like creating a ghost of the object stored on a computer server. And for the institution, that ghost becomes more real, more manageable than the piece of metal, the curator, the researcher, the audience - they interact with the database entry far more often than they interact with the physical clasp. The ghost becomes the day-to-day reality. And that ghost has a biography. This leads us to our next section, The Cultural Biography of the Clasp.